


Barheim Passage

by lynndyre



Category: Persona 3
Genre: Best Friends, Crossover, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-08-20
Updated: 2009-08-20
Packaged: 2017-10-05 05:33:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/38310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lynndyre/pseuds/lynndyre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shinji and Aki are not in <s>Kansas</s> Japan anymore.<br/>-This is a crossover with the world (terrain) of FF XII, but no knowledge of that canon is required.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Barheim Passage

**Author's Note:**

  * For [threewalls](https://archiveofourown.org/users/threewalls/gifts).



It wasn't the walls Shinji noticed first, it was the floor. Tartarus was a mutant nightmare of a building, but it still had floor. Only now it had gravel. And rocks. And ...rails. This looked less like a hallway than a tunnel, and when he spun around, there was only damp brick behind them.

"Aki?"

"Maybe it dropped us onto another floor." Aki rotated his shoulders, scanned their surroundings.

"Maybe. But I'm not getting Yamagishi, are you?"

Aki eyed the wall behind them, then kept looking around instead of answering. "They'll catch up." Something skittered, away down the corridor, and the lighting flickered. Aki turned after the noise like a pointer. "Wherever we are, there are still shadows to fight."

 

It didn't look like any shadows they'd met yet, but it attacked like one, and Shinji was willing to buy Aki's theory - right up until his axe bit into the bug-thing's head and instead of bloodstains and shadow-dust it turned into dancing lights and a backwash of magic. "Shit." Aki shook out his hands, tightened his bladed gloves in silence, and Shinji adjusted his grip on his axe-haft.

"Follow the rails?" The way Aki's eyes were narrowed meant he probably had the same fuck-all idea what's going on as Shinji did, but the shitty smirk meant he'd decided to enjoy the challenge.

"Nothing better to do."

Aki always was idiotically contagious.

 

The rails split further down the line, and twice they turned back where rock falls had blocked the way ahead. They found things that might have been treasure chests, but the one Shinji opened had a lump of rusty metal at the bottom. There was another one at the junction of two tunnels, but when Aki reached for it, the chest turned into a giant version of the little electric bugs.

Shinji's first swing connected, but didn't stop the thing, and his second went wide when it skittered back out of Aki's range and shoved its damn fangs into Shinji's leg. He swung again, felt rather than saw it connect, and Aki finished pummeling the thing into sparkles. Shinji leaned on his axe and gritted his teeth.

"Don't overdo it." Aki drew his evoker. Stupid Castor liked Polydeuces more than Io or Nemesis or any of Arisato's crew – the rush of healing on Shinji's leg came with a head full of irritating happy horsie noises.

The right paths were blocked off, about a hundred meters past the turn, so they took the left one down, kept following it until the tunnel started opening out. It looked like they'd found an exit at first, but closer up the rails dead-ended into some kind of underground lake - scrap metal and rocks and little glowy things.

The lamp flickered again as they retreated from the water's edge. The giant toad thing hadn't dissolved all the way, and Shinji poked the pointy horn with his foot, then picked it up. There wasn't any gunk on the end that had been attached, just the smooth ivory. He waved it under Aki's nose, and it got a grin, so he stuck it in his pocket.

Then the light went out.

It wasn't completely dark, there were still the lights behind them in the tunnel, and a lamppost farther along the lake behind the rocks, but Shinji's eyes took a minute to adjust. There were still the little glowy things from the lake, and for a minute it looked like they were making foggy shapes. A people shape. Out of the ground.

He blinked. And then he could smell it.

"What the hell?" Aki had the back of his glove shoved up against his nose, but Shinji bet that wasn't helping much. The thing smelled _dead_, sweet and rancid and heavy but it was _moving_, like it didn't know it was rotting apart.

It twisted, stepped towards them, and its knee bent 45° the wrong way. Shinji thought he heard Aki gag. It pitched forward another step and reached for them, and Aki smashed his fist into its head so hard it crunched. Shinji pulled the trigger, and Castor struck.

Could you kill something if it was already dead?

Shinji's axe caught in its ribcage and he kicked out to pull it free. Things squished under his foot. Its arm flailed and knocked him backwards. He got in one more good swing, then Polydeuces zapped it and it staggered backward and dissolved into lights.

"Let's get out of here!"

"That way!" Shinji pointed, up the rocks, away from the lake. There was fresh air coming from somewhere, and outside had to be better than tunnels full of dead people. They flat out ran. More shapes were crawling up out of the dirt, one of them grabbed Aki's ankle. Shinji kicked it in the face and cut its arm off. Aki scrambled up again and they kept running. There was a doorway where the path bent - they pelted through and slammed it behind them. There were rocks outside, and both of them leaned into shoving broken bits of archway in front of the door. It held.

Then Shinji turned around.

"What the hell?"

Moonlight, so outside, yeah, but. Fuck. This wasn't Port Island, or Iwatodai. It didn't even look like Japan. It looked like a damn desert. "Tartarus ever do this to you before?"

Aki shook his head. He was bent over, gloves braced on his thighs, breathing hard. "Never. Nothing like this." Aki waved a glove at the sky. "Besides, the moon's normal. It's not even the dark hour anymore."

A cool, dry wind blew Shinji's hair into his mouth, smelling like alien-ness, and tasting like dust. "Shit."

They moved away from the blockaded door. The paving ended, and Shinji's boots sank unevenly into the sand. Aki stumbled. "Did one of those things get you?"

"Think so." Aki sat down with his back to the rock wall, and Shinji followed him over, watched him undo his gloves with his teeth, same as a million other times, only different. He turned around to watch the sand. Off to the right of the door, there weren't any more cliffs, and the dunes kept going as far as he could see. There was a bit of light from the moon, and a little more from a blue crystal at the edge of the area, right before the ground dropped down into more dunes. Maybe it was why there wasn't anything attacking them here.

Shinji sat down next to Aki. At least like this, with the wall behind them, they'd be able to see it coming, if anything did show up. Aki made a face at the taste of the dis-poison, then leaned back against the rock, eyes closed. "It's weird. Feels different to the stuff shadows normally pull." Shinji dug out his last medicine powder, and dropped it in Aki's lap. "Huh? Oh. Thank you." Aki ate the powder dry, which Shinji figured was a skill developed to stop him choking to death on his disgusting protein powder snack ideas. There were a lot more stars out than Shinji had seen before.

He watched the sky until Aki decided to use his shoulder for a pillow and then- again, always, stupid of him- he followed Aki's lead, and slept.

 

When Shinji woke up, he was freezing and there was sand stuck to his face. Aki didn't stir at all when Shinji moved, not even when Shinji shoved him, and that makes Shinji's gut a whole different kind of cold. He was out of medicines completely now, and there was nothing in Aki's pockets - his wallet, a chopstick wrapper, a train pass, another useless dis-poison, a muscle drink. Shouldn't have let Aki fall asleep. Shouldn't have let _himself_ fall asleep.

"Aki! Wake up, dumbass." Aki twitched, but his eyes didn't open, and he was still mostly limp under Shinji's hands. Shinji shook him harder. "Wake up!"

They were fuck knows where with no backup, no medicine, no nothing - "Aki you _stupid shit_!" No suppressors either, but Shinji would worry about that when it happened. He shoved Aki back onto the ground, scrambled up to kneeling, planted the barrel of his evoker right between Aki's eyes.

"Wake the fuck _up_! Polydeuces!"

Light, and Aki seized with it, eyes suddenly open and all whites, but Polydeuces came. He came. And maybe somebody was listening to Shinji after all, because he cast dia before he vanished, and Aki's eyes started focusing again.

"Hnh... ngh?"

Shinji slumped down again into the sand. His hands were shaking, and his evoker probably had sand in it now."You stupid shit."

He made Aki call Polydeuces three more times before he let him stop, and by that point they were both awake, and Aki was shivering. Shinji pulled off his hat, held it out at arm's length, glared until Aki took it. It looked funny, made Aki look weaker, especially when he pulled it down over his ears. Shinji watched the night instead, but leaned close against Aki's shoulder all the same.

"If you're not gonna die, go back to sleep for a bit. There's people around, or there wouldn't be railroad tunnels. We'll find somebody in the morning, and you can punch 'em until they explain shit."


End file.
